Creating an organization relationship between your on-premises organization and the cloud-based organization enables users in both organizations to securely share their calendar availability (free/busy) information with each other. To enable sharing, you will need to create an organization relationship for both your on-premises organization and your cloud-based organization. Creating an organization for your on-premises organization configures the calendar availability (free/busy) information options that define what your on-premises users are allowed to share with your cloud-based service users.

This topic is meant to be read as part of the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Office 365 Hybrid Deployment checklist. Information or procedures in this topic may depend on prerequisites configured in topics earlier in the checklist. To view the checklist, see Checklist - Exchange 2007 and Office 365 Hybrid Deployment

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need to create an organization relationship, see the "Organization relationships" entry in Mailbox Permissions.

You can use the New Organization Relationship wizard in the Exchange Management Console on the hybrid server to create the organization relationship.

In the console tree, click Organization Configuration for the on-premises Exchange forest.

In the action pane, click New Organization Relationship.

On the Introduction page, complete the following fields:

Name Type a name for the organization relationship. For example, "To Cloud" indicates that this relationship is for the cloud-based organization.

Enable this organization relationship Select this check box to enable this organization relationship.

Enable free/busy information access Select this check box to specify that this organization relationship should be used for retrieving free/busy information from the on-premises organization by the cloud-based organization.

Specify free/busy data access level Select one of these options to specify what type of free/busy information should be retrieved from the on-premises organization by the cloud-based organization:

Free/busy access with time only or

Free/busy access with time, plus subject and location

Specify a security distribution group that indicates what internal users free/busy data is accessible Select this check box if you want to specify a distribution group to list your users who can have their free/busy information accessed by the cloud-based service organization. Use the corresponding box to type the SMTP address of a security distribution group within your organization, or click Browse to search for the group.

On the External Organization page, complete the following fields:

Automatically discover configuration information Select this option to have Exchange locate the configuration information of the cloud-based organization by using Autodiscover.

Specify a federated domain of the external Exchange organization Enter a federated domain of the cloud-based organization (for example, service.contoso.com). You can't specify more than one domain.

Note:

You can also choose to manually enter the federated domains for the cloud-based organization during this step. If you elect to manually configure the federated domains, enter both the service-routing namespace and the primary SMTP namespaces for your on-premises organization. For example, the federated domains include both the service.contoso.com and contoso.com domains. If either of these domains is missing from the organization relationship, the sharing of free/busy availability information may not function correctly.

On the New Organization Relationship page, review your configuration settings. Click New to create the organization relationship. Click Back to make changes.

On the Completion page, review the following, and then click Finish to close the wizard:

A status of Completed indicates that the wizard completed the task successfully.

A status of Failed indicates that the task wasn't completed. If the task fails, review the summary for an explanation, and then click Back to make any configuration changes.

After you create the organization relationship, you must also manually add the primary SMTP namespace and enable MailTips and message tracking for the organization relationship so these features function correctly. If you chose to manually add both the service-routing and primary SMTP namespaces as federated domains in the New Organization wizard, you will only have to enable MailTips and message tracking.

To add the primary SMTP namespace and enable MailTips and message tracking to the on-premises organization relationship, use the following command in the Shell on the hybrid server.

After creating the organization relationship, you must add an availability address space to define the access method and credentials used to exchange free/busy information between your Exchange 2007 Mailbox server and the hybrid server.

To add an availability address space for your on-premises organization, use the following command in the Shell on the hybrid server.

If a This operation is not available in current service offer error is returned after running this command, your cloud-based organization is already configured for customization. You can safely ignore this error and continue with the checklist steps.

Next, you can use the New Organization Relationship wizard in the EMC on the hybrid server to create the organization relationship.

In the console tree, click Organization Configuration for the cloud-based organization Exchange forest.

In the action pane, click New Organization Relationship.

On the Introduction page, complete the following fields:

Name Type a name for the organization relationship. For example, "To On-Premises" indicates that this relationship is for the on-premises organization.

Enable this organization relationship Select this check box to enable this organization relationship.

Enable free/busy information access Select this check box to specify that this organization relationship should be used for retrieving free/busy information from the cloud-based organization by the on-premises organization.

Specify free/busy data access level Select one of these options to specify what type of free/busy information should be retrieved from the cloud-based organization by the on-premises organization:

Free/busy access with time only

Free/busy access with time, plus subject and location

Specify a security distribution group that indicates what internal users free/busy data is accessible Select this check box if you want to specify a distribution group to list your users who can have their free/busy information accessed by the on-premises organization. Use the corresponding box to type the SMTP address of a security distribution group within your organization, or click Browse to search for the group.

On the External Organization page, complete the following fields:

Automatically discover configuration information Click this button to have Exchange locate the configuration information of the on-premises organization by using Autodiscover.

Specify a federated domain of the external Exchange organization Enter a federated domain of the on-premises organization (for example, contoso.com). You can't specify more than one domain.

Note:

You can also choose to manually enter the federated domains for the on-premises organization during this step. If you elect to manually configure the federated domains, enter both the federated delegation namespace and the primary SMTP namespace for your on-premises organization. For example, the federated domains include both the exchangedelegation.contoso.com and contoso.com domains. If either of these domains is missing from the organization relationship, the sharing of free/busy availability information may not function correctly.

On the New Organization Relationship page, review your configuration settings. Click New to create the organization relationship. Click Back to make changes.

On the Completion page, review the following, and then click Finish to close the wizard:

A status of Completed indicates that the wizard completed the task successfully.

A status of Failed indicates that the task wasn't completed. If the task fails, review the summary for an explanation, and then click Back to make any configuration changes.

After creating the organization relationship, you must also manually add the federated delegation namespace and enable MailTips and message tracking for the organization relationship so these features function correctly. If you chose to manually add both the federated delegation and primary SMTP namespaces as federated domains in the New Organization wizard, you will only have to enable MailTips and message tracking.

To add the federated delegation namespace and enable MailTips and message tracking for the cloud-based organization relationship, use the following command in the Shell on the cloud-based organization.

The successful completion of the New Organization Relationship wizards will be your first indication that creating the organization relationships worked as expected. To further verify that the organization relationships are configured correctly, you can also run the following command in the Shell for both the on-premises and cloud-based organizations.

Having problems? Ask for help in the Office 365 forums. To access the forums, you'll need to sign in using an account that's granted administrator access to your cloud-based service. Visit the forums at: Office 365 Forums